Our brains are built for generosity

As if giving a perfectly good kidney to a total stranger wasn’t enough of a distinction, it turns out that extreme altruists have bigger brains and are better than the rest of us at reading signs of distress in facial expressions.
That’s what neuroscientistsat Georgetown University found when they rounded up 39 kidney donors and scanned their brains, according to a study published online Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Greed is good. Competition is natural. War is inevitable. Whether in political theory or popular culture, human nature is often portrayed as selfish and power hungry. UC Berkeley psychologist Dacher Keltner challenges this notion of human nature and seeks to better understand why we evolved pro-social emotions like empathy, compassion and gratitude. We've all heard the phrase "survival of the fittest," born from the Darwinian theory of natural selection. Keltner adds nuance to this concept by delving deeper into Darwin's idea that sympathy is one of the strongest human instincts — sometimes stronger than self-interest.